


defense mechanisms and the concept of womanhood

by natromanoffs



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Gen, No Pierce, britta centric, womanhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26070457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/natromanoffs/pseuds/natromanoffs
Summary: Britta’s not quite sure how her Psych assignment led to her hunched under the table having a complete identity crisis, but sometimes the mind just does things that don’t make sense.
Relationships: Shirley Bennett & Annie Edison & Britta Perry
Comments: 7
Kudos: 27





	defense mechanisms and the concept of womanhood

**Author's Note:**

> just a heads up that this isn't firmly situated in canon. i did not have the energy to find a specific spot in the show to stick this in, so there may be some mixed elements that don't fit, sorry ! also this is my first time putting like a course name sort of title on a community fic so i hope it seems okay haha.

The assignment is on yellow paper, and Britta takes it and shoves it into her backpack without even reading it. She’ll get to it later. 

A week or so later, she sees a fellow Psych student in the cafeteria. He asks her if she’s finished the homework assignment yet, and she just shrugs and shakes her head. He walks off to see if he can find someone else to ask for help. She sits down, shoves a couple fries into her mouth, and then finally grabs the now-crumpled handout to see what this assignment actually is.

She scrunches up her face as she finishes reading the assignment. She’s supposed to find five examples of defense mechanisms and write a paragraph about each one. It’s not that difficult, the assignment comes with a list of possible mechanisms to discuss, it’s just that now she’s got less than a week to do this so she has to get to working on it immediately.

That afternoon, when she’s sitting with the study group, book open but eyes glazed over, she realizes there are exactly five other people in the study group. So she just has to pick out a defense mechanism for each of them and then she’ll be set.

Jeff is the easiest -- he clearly has a big affinity for denial. Britta’s just finally started to actually read her textbook when she’s distracted by the power in Annie’s voice. Britta glances up and tunes back into the conversation.

“Come on,” Annie says, dropping her book with newfound aggression. “Jeff, you’re not _actually_ saying that you hate rom coms.”

“Oh, I _actually_ am,” he says.

“That’s not true,” Annie persists. “I swear, I was talking about _My Best Friend’s Wedding_ once and you said you liked it!”

“I didn’t,” Jeff says simply, shrugging and shaking his head.

“You know,” Abed pipes in, “That movie was actually quite inventive in that it--”

“Not now, Abed!” Annie turns her white hot glare to Jeff. “You _said_ that you liked it.”

Jeff shrugs again. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

They keep arguing, Annie keeps insisting that Jeff said this, and even brings up other specific things that happened on that day, but Jeff does not relent. Britta whips out a spare page of notebook paper and begins to take notes.

Figuring out a defense mechanism that Abed uses is pretty easy. Frequently when big things happen to the group, he’ll step back emotionally and quickly make some comment about how the moment does or does not align with TV show tropes. It’s clearly an example of dissociation -- he removes himself emotionally from the situation and instead sees it from an outside point of view. She’s pretty sure he’s very aware that he uses this mechanism, but nonetheless, it’s still a way for him to defend himself. By stepping back and analyzing the situation, he avoids having to step into the emotional aspects of the issue. He doesn’t do it all the time, of course -- Abed’s a lot more emotional than most people give him credit for -- but still, it pops up pretty frequently.

She can’t figure out a defense mechanism for Troy until the next day. Jeff’s talking about something that she can’t quite wrap her head around. It’s about the Sonic characters and how one character -- Trails? -- is dead in some universe, and before she can even begin to unpack the layers there Troy is wailing. 

“It doesn’t make sense!” he moans. “Because -- he can’t -- because when I saw him he was ALIVE!” 

Troy’s bordering on tears at this point, and Abed’s rubbing his shoulder in an attempt to calm him down.

Britta just raises an eyebrow, she sort of wants to jump in, but she honestly has no idea what they’re talking about, so she just starts taking notes on Troy’s breakdown. He does this often enough, starts groaning and crying and sinking to the ground when something is particularly hard for him to handle. _Regression_ , Britta scribbles at the top of the page. When Troy comes into contact with things he doesn’t know how to deal with, he’ll regress into a more childlike version of himself and freak out instead of actually processing the issue. Luckily, Abed is able to calm Troy down pretty quickly, and now Britta’s got three out of the five sections of her assignment done. She does make a note to ask her professor what might help someone like Troy deal with things in a more productive way. Troy’s never let Britta actually therapize him, but if she can give him a couple tips that help, she’ll still count it as a win for mental health.

Later that day, Annie’s telling Shirley about this dream she had about some guy in the history class that both she and Shirley are taking. Britta’s listening absentmindedly while playing a game on her phone. Annie’s really going into all the tiny details of the dream -- the stubble on this guy’s jaw, the exact way he caressed her face -- and Britta realizes with a start that this is probably Annie’s defense mechanism. Annie often struggles with expressing her feelings towards people she’s interested in, and she spends much more time daydreaming about a life with these people than actually pursuing them. This, Britta realizes, is probably a way for Annie to deal with these feelings without actually having to act on them, thus defending Annie against the potential heartbreak that could ensue if she actually acted on her feelings. Britta switches from her game and over to her notes app, and begins to write Part Four of her assignment.

Shirley is the hardest to figure out. She mainly expresses herself through passive-aggression, which although she certainly does for some psychological reasons, doesn’t line up with any of the defense mechanisms on Britta’s list. At first, Britta thinks she could consider all the passive-aggression a form of displacement, the act of taking one’s feelings toward one thing and redirecting them towards another, but soon realizes that doesn’t quite fit. Shirley is still expressing her feelings towards the original source, just in underhanded ways. It takes Britta a few days to figure out what defense mechanism Shirley uses, and she’s sure Shirley’s noticed her staring at this point. Finally Britta figures it out.

On Thursday, Shirley vents a little bit about a fight she had with Andre. Britta and Annie listen and push Shirley to continue venting and get all of her feelings out, but Shirley just shakes her head. 

“No, no,” she insists. “This is my issue to deal with.”

“Well, then you should tell Andre how you feel,” Britta says. Communication is a key part of any healthy relationship, as even someone who’s not a psychologist could tell her.

Shirley just shakes her head again. “No, no, it’s alright. I want to keep the peace this time.”

Britta doesn’t think too much of this until the next day. Shirley comes in with a box of cupcakes and a box of brownies.

“I was just in the baking mood,” she says with a little smile when Abed asks what’s prompted all this baking.

But then Britta remembers a few other times that Shirley had mentioned a fight with Andre, or some other family infighting, and how almost every time Shirley would show up with baked goods not long after. It’s then that Britta finally realizes that Shirley’s defense mechanism is sublimation. Shirley takes her intense anger, which she is often uncomfortable with expressing, and channels it into baking as a way to absolve herself of those feelings. It’s a pretty complex defense mechanism, one which doesn’t seem to work all that often from what Britta has seen, but Shirley’s just the kind of person who could make good use of it.

Britta spends the weekend working on her assignment from time to time, in between getting high and watching cartoons. On Sunday, she realizes that she really does need to focus a bit more on getting this project finished up since it’s due Monday, so she heads to the campus library. It’s about 8pm by the time she gets there, and it’s fairly empty. She picks a table off in a corner, pulls out her laptop, and gets back to work.

It takes her about three hours, but she finally finishes the project. She’s got about a page on each of the five defense mechanisms she observed, and she’s actually pretty proud of her work. She even allows herself to hope that it might be close to Annie-level work. She closes her laptop and rests her head on her palms, feeling simultaneously satisfied and exhausted. 

She’s spent all week psychoanalyzing her friends, and it’s only now that she realizes that _that_ might be _her_ defense mechanism. The way she can remove herself to be an observer and nothing else certainly allows her to keep her own issues out of the limelight. 

She spends so much time trying to be a good feminist and a good activist, spends so much time triple checking herself for political correctness, and sometimes she wonders if that’s all she is. A husk of a woman who just comments on the political climate and social justice issues and then fades right back into the background.

To her friends, she’s the worst. She’s a buzzkill, always trying to bring politics into everything, and she’s comic relief, someone they can all laugh at when she says something dumb or messes something up. In fact, she’s messed up so much that they literally use her name to mean messing something up. 

She knows they all play different roles in the study group, so if she’s delegated to social justice warrior-ing and weirdo comments then so be it. But sometimes it makes her feel more like the butt of a joke than an actual person. 

She doesn’t even know how to be a person, if she’s being honest with herself. She’s spent so much of her life rejecting feminine gender roles to the point where at times she feels like she’s almost rejected womanhood altogether. But then again, she’s also a die-hard feminist, using her womanhood as a weapon, building up a new sense of what a woman could be. 

She’s good at planning weddings and she’s got a natural talent at cooking and sometimes she just wants to pull an Annie and flounce around in a little pink skirt just to see how it would feel. She hates the part of her that is traditionally feminine, because it lines up with all the misogynistic norms and roles that she’s tried so hard to reject. But she also hates the part of her that isn’t traditionally feminine — if she wasn’t such a die-hard feminist, if she liked cooking and cleaning and was okay with that, she could just be a woman in the terrible traditional sense of the word. She’s not sure that would be a good thing, but at least she wouldn’t feel like this, like some in-between sort of woman, in between traditional femininity and something else she’s not quite sure how to name.

So maybe all this, all this constant fighting that goes on her head, the way how she performs her womanhood is almost always at the front of her brain, maybe all this is what prevents her from engaging with the group like a real person. Maybe that’s why she resorts to activist comments and dumb lines because she doesn’t know how to fit in otherwise.

Shirley’s the mother figure, at least to some extent. She’s the voice of morality and religiosity. And she’s got some qualities of a typical housewife, what with her constant baking and struggles with childcare. 

Annie’s the love interest — she’s been somewhat entangled with Jeff and Troy on various occasions. Britta’s hesitant to reduce Annie to a love interest just because Jeff and Troy often look at her that way — but sometimes Annie does it to herself. She _tries_ to be the love interest, the girl who longingly gazes at people and twirls her hair around her fingers.

Obviously Shirley and Annie are more than just a mother figure and a love interest. Still, though, they fit into those roles well, those typical feminine roles that women are expected to fit into.

And Britta just doesn’t. She gives advice to her friends sometimes, a little like a mother, but then more often than not she’s the one making mistakes. Sure, she’s had some love interest qualities — both Jeff and Troy have looked at her like that, too — but she doesn’t play into it like Annie does, she rejects it as best she can, offering a bug-eyed face rather than a simpering smile.

She doesn’t fit into those traditional roles, so she just exists somewhere on the periphery. She’ll dip her toe in from time to time but she never dives in. And she doesn’t want to, not really, but she’s not sure how to be a woman without fitting into one of the woman boxes that are so neatly laid out for her. 

There’s no real solution. She could just dive in, could force herself to become more of a trope and less of a person, but she’d never be happy like that. She could leave womanhood behind, could avoid every single feminine role there is and be a woman in her own definition only. But that can’t work either, not when she still sometimes finds herself drawn to feminine roles and activities in spite of herself.

Britta’s not sure when she crawled under the table, she was too caught up in her internal monologue to really notice her body moving, but she’s here now, legs pulled up to her chest and a wispy panic blooming in her chest. She doesn’t know what to do with herself. She doesn’t know how to be a woman. She doesn’t know how to be a traditional role-defined woman or how to be a feminist role-defying woman, and that just leaves her feeling empty and broken. 

“Britta?” Shirley’s unmistakable tone comes from above, and Britta opens her eyes to see two pairs of shoes standing next to the table -- a pair of black flats and a pair of pink mary janes.

She pulls herself out from underneath the table with an awkward smile and looks up at them. “Heyyy.”

“Why were you under the table?” Annie asks with a confused smile.

Britta just shrugs. “Better question, why are you two on campus so late?” 

“Oh, we were just finishing up a project for our history class,” Shirley says.

“Britta…” Annie starts, that sympathetic look filling her eyes. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Britta says, shrugging and making a face. 

Annie and Shirley both just look at her with tilted heads and wait for her to speak.

“I don’t know,” she says again, and sighs. “I was just working on my Psych assignment, and then somehow..” She scrunches her eyebrows together. “I guess I just started thinking about like, what it means to a woman, or whatever. And, I don’t know, I just feel like I don’t really fit it? Like you guys.. no offense, but you’re pretty typically feminine. I’m not, and I’m fine with that, mostly, but I just.. sometimes I feel like I don’t know how to be a woman. Or, like, I’m not doing it correctly? I’m not being a woman correctly but I’m also not rejecting femininity correctly so I just feel… I don’t know. Lost, sort of.” 

Britta shrugs again, trying to shake off the weird feeling that’s still lingering in her chest.

“Oh, Britta..” Shirley says. “You don’t have to be feminine to be a woman. I know to you guys I’m just the mom and housewife, but that’s not how I see myself. I’m more than just that stereotype, you know. You can be a woman in whichever way you want.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Britta says.

“Yeah and I..” Annie shrugs. “I get a little weird about all that stuff sometimes too.” She offers Britta her hand. “Come on. Let’s go get milkshakes or something.”

Britta grabs Annie’s hand and stands up again. She grabs her laptop, and the three of them head to the parking lot.

Shirley puts her arm around Britta’s shoulders, and Annie never lets go of her hand. 

Britta’s not quite sure how her Psych assignment led to her hunched under the table having a complete identity crisis, but sometimes the mind just does things that don’t make sense.

She still feels like she’s spiraling a little, but with Shirley’s arm resting on her shoulders, and Annie holding her hand, at least she can breathe a little easier. At least, around them, she can share this sort of thing. If, over milkshakes, she talks about it a little more, it’ll be okay. They’ll understand, a least to some degree. 

At the very least, around them, she can be more open about it. She doesn’t have to try so hard to defend herself.

**Author's Note:**

> this idea honestly came out of nowhere, and i'm still not sure i'm quite happy with this. but i love britta so much, and i'm always bitter about what the show gave her n her characterization so this may be partially my way of dealing w that lmao. britta perry deserves better !!!


End file.
